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In the past you saw inter­na­tion­al and nation­al stan­dard­iza­tion of very well‐defined tech­nolo­gies. For exam­ple, if you were going to build nuts and bolts, what the threads look like, and you know, with the prop­er spac­ing and height and grip and so on. And so you know, this is not rock­et sci­ence. It’s crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant to an engineer’s infra­struc­ture to have stan­dard­iza­tion of these things, but it’s not as if we are try­ing to some­how cod­i­fy the laws of physics.

The inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non relat­ed to the RSA algo­rithm and is not shared with some of the oth­er algo­rithms is it is use­ful for both encryp­tion and for dig­i­tal sig­na­ture. That is they are two dis­tinct uses and this sin­gle algo­rithm is use­ful for both of those. And there’s an amaz­ing and some­what inter­est­ing sto­ry that then devel­ops from that.

The peo­ple that invent­ed Ethernet did a real good thing. Ethernet is good tech­nol­o­gy. But they did a real­ly bad thing because they called it a net. And they shouldn’t have called it Ethernet, they should’ve called it ​“Etherlink.”

We’re at a thou­sand dol­lars per giga­byte, which is what cur­rent disk dri­ves cost. The twen­ty ter­abytes that peo­ple esti­mate in ASCII that’s in the Library of Congress is just twen­ty mil­lion dol­lars. So that’s not very much mon­ey in terms of being able to store and retrieve [crosstalk] the Library of Congress.